An email exchange between an anti-corruption activist and exiled whistleblower John Christmas has revealed that Edward Lucas, Senior Editor of The Economist, is running a secret campaign to undermine Christmas’ efforts to end the corrupt relationship between the Kremlin and the EBRD.

Christmas has been working for years to get a massive criminal conspiracy into the mainstream media. The EBRD, funded by Western taxpayers with a mission of “fostering transparency” in Eastern Europe was caught organizing a multi-billion-euro fraudulent bailout of Parex Bank at the expense of duped Latvian taxpayers. Parex has been linked to Vladimir Putin’s Tambovskaya Mafia. Almost half of the assets of Parex mysteriously disappeared in 2008/2009 and the Latvian government has been running a disinformation campaign together with the EBRD to blame the “United States” and “Sweden.” Lucas has been an important part of this disinformation campaign, praising Valdis Dombrovskis who signed the fraudulent cover-up as Latvian prime minister and then was promoted to important responsibilities at the European Commission level for protecting the integrity of the Euro.

The activist wrote to Christmas that she was considering nominating him for a prize from Transparency International because of his long years working in exile to fight Latvia’s money laundering banks. These banks have been actively looting Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, and other countries for many years. However, Lucas convinced her not to nominate Christmas by lying that he investigated Christmas’ accusations and discovered that the accusations weren’t true.

I did contact Edward Lucas about you, but he said that he and all the other major newspapers checked into your story and it didn’t add up. Sorry about that!

It has already been established that the Parex bailout was a cover-up fraud. The Latvian government nationalized Parex and then supposedly privatized a stake in Parex by selling it to the EBRD in 2009. The politicians lied to the voters for a few years that they were heroes for rescuing Latvia from the “United States” and “Sweden.” Then, after getting re-elected on this platform of lies, they admitted that the privatization was fake and reversed the privatization in 2014. This has already happened. Anyone can confirm this in a few minutes by looking at government press releases. It is impossible that Lucas or anyone else really “checked into the story” and discovered that the bailout wasn’t fraudulent because it was fraudulent.

And yet Lucas continues to ignore all of the facts and write and tell lies to build a fake hero image for Dombrovskis. There are a lot of people who hate Putin and love Lucas because they perceive Lucas to be against Putin. We encourage all of Lucas’ fans to ask him: if he is against Putin then why is he spreading lies to protect Putin and hurt a whistleblower?

We also received information from another source regarding the ongoing effort of the EBRD to cover-up for Putin with our money.

The new information regards Ukio Bank of Lithuania. We already had information from an anonymous whistleblower that the Ukio/EBRD bailout was a big fraud similar to the Parex/EBRD bailout. Then, Ukio Bank was identified as a money launderer for Putin in the Panama Papers. Now, we can link that racket with Parex as well. Arnis Lagzdins was an employee of Parex from 2004 to 2008 with a function of lying to Western institutions that Parex was a lawful bank. Now we have learned that in 2009, Lagzdins switched to Ukio to perform the same function there. This was at the same time Parex was looted and Putin’s money laundering activities moved from Parex to Ukio for a few years before Ukio was looted also. Coincidence? Lagzdins is now based at the Latvian Embassy in Washington where his job is telling American officials that Latvia is fighting very hard to stop money laundering.

Lucas himself wrote that the EBRD was protecting Kremlin-linked banks to make them appear respectable in his book “The New Cold War” published in 2008. This was true. However soon after that book was published, he started fighting the opposite way to disinform his audience that the EBRD wasn’t doing this. Seems that someone from the EBRD and/or Kremlin must have convinced him to switch sides.

This matter is no joke. Many billions of dollars have been stolen from many millions of victims in many countries and laundered through banks linked with Parex AFTER the EBRD cover-up and this could have been prevented if Lucas had published truthful articles about the Parex crash.

Anyone who wants to read the full email exchanges with the activist and Lucas may request those at [email protected]

The criminal attack by the EBRD against the people of Eastern Europe has been going on for two decades with no end in sight. In the 1990’s, the EBRD funded multiple criminal banks in Russia using our tax money. In 2009, the EBRD covered-up fraud at Parex Bank of Latvia with a fraudulent share purchase. And now, with help from Deloitte, the EBRD has launched a criminal attack against the people of Lithuania.

Perhaps this is surprising since the EBRD and Deloitte both blab on with rhetoric about how they are opposed to fraud and corruption and they love whistleblowers. Perhaps this is also surprising because European officials are doing nothing even though they also blab on with the same rhetoric. Nevertheless, this is what is happening.

Deloitte was notified of the EBRD’s fraudulent purchase of Parex stock, with a secret side agreement to sell the worthless stock back to the Latvian government. The purpose of the fraud was to fool Latvians, Europeans, and creditors that Parex and Latvia were not frauds even though they were. Sadly, the people at Deloitte refused to cancel their fake audit opinions of the EBRD.

The EBRD, knowing that they “got away with” the cover-up in Latvia, decided to strike again. This time, the victims are the people of Lithuania. The EBRD has fraudulently covered-up the truth about Ukio Bank at Lithuanian taxpayer expense.

The following is an email from a journalist to exiled Parex whistleblower John Christmas regarding the EBRD’s involvement in Siauliu Bank in 2011 and Ukio Bank in 2013. The journalist interviewed Christmas by phone and said (1) the EBRD funding of Siauliu and Ukio was fraudulent and similar to Parex, (2) Siauliu and Ukio had criminal reputations similar to Parex, and (3) the funding was (again) intermediated by Bridge Capital and LAWIN of Latvia. The journalist said he was using a fake name because he was afraid of being assassinated by the KGB. He hints at that in the email.

Thank you for your reply. Maybe we can have a skype conversation tomorrow, and afterwards we can fill the information gaps via e-mail. I am a journalist covering finance sector, and since the first bank went broke in 2011 (second one – 2013 march) the main focus of my analyses and publications has been the practice of managing banking crises in Baltic states. Few months ago I’ve had interviews with high figures of certain Lithuanian institutions, and they confirmed me that the last EBRD deal with buying good assets of the failed Ukio bank via it’s controlled Siauliu bank was completely fraudulent and very similar to the EBRD/Parex deal Latvia. I’ve covered most of the public information about Parex and your enormous efforts trying to show that the taxpayers were tricked on a big scale.

What time would you prefer to have a Skype talk tomorrow?

Dear John, thank you one more time for the reply, because we don’t want our taxpayers (which I am a part of) to pay for corrupt deals and hopefully your input will fill in the information gaps that I still have.

P.S. If you don’t mind, I will be contacting you under this surname since the corruption here in Lithuania is as bad as in Latvia, so this would be a healthy precaution for me.

I am writing under a surname from Lithuania where we have experienced the dealings of EBRD as well since there has been a very mysterious acquisition of a failed bank Ukio bank by EBRD controlled Siauliu bank. We have been doing a journalistic investigation ever since March. I started covering Parex case in comparison and realized that there are too many common things in both acquisitions. I wanted to ask whether you will be willing to share your experience and insights into these corrupt dealings between post-soviet Baltic states and EBRD.